His black locks curled about his ears, which seemed rather small now; he had a good nose and a mobile, clean-shaven face.  His hands were very white and soft, and the rim of linen above them was dazzling.  His black frock-coat was buttoned snugly about his slim waist.  He brushed his face with a fine silk handkerchief, and thereby diffused the fragrance of the best imported cologne among the odors of wood and turpentine.  A diamond pin sparkled from his neckscarf.  The truth is, he knew that the visitors were coming and had made a state toilet.  “He looks half like an actor and half like a clergyman, and he is all a politician,” thought Mrs. Carriswood; “I don’t think I shall like him any more.”  While she thought, she was inclining her slender neck toward him, and the gentlest interest and pleasure beamed out of her beautiful, dark eyes.

“We like the West, but I have liked it for ten years; this is not my first visit,” said Mrs. Carriswood.

“I have reason to be glad for that, madam.  I never made another speech so good.”

He had remembered her; she laughed.  “I had thought that you would forget.”

“How could I, when you have not changed at all?”

“But you have,” says Mrs. Carriswood, hardly knowing whether to show the young man his place or not.

“Yes, ma’am, naturally.  But I have not learned how to make a speech yet.”

“Ah, but you make very good ones, Harry tells me.”

“Much obliged, Harry.  No, ma’am, Harry is a nice boy; but he doesn’t know.  I know there is a lot to learn, and I guess a lot to unlearn; and I feel all outside; I don’t even know how to get at it.  I have wished a thousand times that I could talk with the lady who taught me to speak in the first place.”  He walked on by her side, talking eagerly.  “You don’t know how many times I have felt I would give most anything for the opportunity of just seeing you and talking with you; those things you said to me I always remembered.”  He had a hundred questions evidently stinging his tongue.  And some of them seemed to Mrs. Carriswood very apposite.

“I’m on the outside of such a lot of things,” says he.  “When I first began to suspect that I was on the outside was when I went to the High School, and sometimes I was invited to Harry’s; that was my first acquaintance with cultivated society.  You can’t learn manners from books, ma’am.  I learned them at Harry’s.  That is,”—­he colored and laughed,—­“I learned some.  There’s plenty left, I know.  Then, I went to the University.  Some of the boys came from homes like Harry’s, and some of the professors there used to ask us to their houses; and I saw engravings and oil paintings, and heard the conversation of persons of culture.  All this only makes me know enough to know I am outside.  I can see the same thing with the lawyers, too.  There is a set of them that are after another kind of things; that think